I read a lot, over 200 books every year. This year I’m going to set a new personal record for the number of books read, but I don’t yet know exactly what that number will be – I’ve still got a few weeks left and the last two weeks of the year I’m on holiday leave so you can bet I’ll be reading as much as possible. I read 221 books in 2018 and I’ve already surpassed that for 2019! (Friend/follow me on Goodreads, I always love learning what others are reading!)

My job sent me to school for a year, a full grad program crammed into ten months. Because of this compressed schedule, I’m doing a LOT of academic reading – books and scholarly journals, hundreds of pages each day. I did the math and we averaged 25 scholarly journals per week, in addition to the textbook reading. This averaged 125 pages per day, which is 625 pages per week. This semester started the first week of August which means by the time classes wrap up in two weeks, I’ll have read approximately 13,125 pages. Here’s the books I was assigned to read this semester:

Fall semester assigned books

Class wraps up for the year on December 20th, and I’m greatly looking forward to my two week break. While much of the reading was interesting, it was crushed into an intense schedule and when you’re trying to read, digest, think, and then talk intelligently about the topics, it all starts to run together and quickly becomes less enjoyable. So I’m ready for the semester to wrap up and to put aside all thoughts of school for a couple of weeks.

I have a stack of non-academic books to read, books I’ll be reading simply for pleasure or for research for my creative writing. Nothing about strategy or economics or leadership or technology. Books that will serve no purpose other than entertaining me. And I cannot wait. It’s been a long semester and I’m ready for a break.